Software list:

• 123D Catch (Autodesk)
• PhotoScan (Agisoft)
• Photomodeller, Bundler
• Visual SFM
• Photosynth (Microsoft)
• Acutrans 3D
• Zsurf

Printrbot: Your First 3D Printer (Kickstarter).

Xiaolin Wei and Jinxiang Chai developed a program that tracks human bodies in videos to create animated 3D models (which can then be viewed from any angle). It will be presented at Siggraph in Los Angeles.

Download a PDF or download the video.

Via New Scientist.

There is lot’s of different cheap design for building your own 3D scanner, here are a few:

• SCAN Z do-it-yourself 3D scanner
• Building a Homemade Laser Line Scanner (CS6998, Spring ’01)
• Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners
• Scanalicious: A 3D Scanner GUI Client and Micro-controller Software
• 3-D Laser Scanner
• Scanalicious: A 3D Scanner for You and Me
• 3D Scannerless Scanning for Fabbers
• Splinescan: Open Source 3D Scanning
• NXT™ 3D scanner
• DAVID-laserscanner: Low-Cost 3D Scanner for Everyone!
• stripo-3DSCAN Light
• Structured Light 3D Scanning
• Milkscanner: Displacement Mapping
• Using Meshlab to Clean and Assemble 3D Scan Data
• Build your own 3D scanner
• 3D Photography on your desk/li>
• Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners/li>
• Project DASER: Introduction/li>

1. First, do edge detection using GIMP (or any other image editing program)
2. Then, convert to SVG using Inkscape (File – Import, then Path – Trace Bitmap)
3. Save as a DXF
4. Fix DXF in AutoCAD (because it probably created too many lines)

Autocad plot pdf text as text with PDFCreator (instead of images of text):

File – Page Setup Manager – Manage Page Setups – Page Setup Manager – Modify – Printer/Plotter, PDFCreator.pc3, Properties – Graphics – True Type Text – True Type Text as Text

How to have AutoCAD publish to multiple PDF files instead of one PDF
file with multiple pages:

The following variables need to be set to “0″:
PUBLISHCOLLATE = 0
BACKGROUNDPLOT = 0

In Sheet Set Publish Options, change the general DWF options “TYPE”
from Multi-Sheet DWF to Single-Sheet DWF.